Non-Invasive Brain Imaging Shows Readiness of Trainees

While simulation platforms have been used to train surgeons before they enter an actual operating room (OR), few studies have evaluated how well trainees transfer those skills from the simulator to the OR.

Now, a study that used non-invasive brain imaging to evaluate brain activity has found that simulator-trained medical students successfully transferred those skills to operating on cadavers and were faster than peers who had no simulator training.

The study, led by Arun Nemani, MS, a PhD candidate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, evaluated the surgical proficiency of 19 medical students, six of whom practiced cutting tasks on a physical simulator, eight of whom practiced on a virtual simulator, and five of whom had no practice. Study results were presented at the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress 2017.

The medical students who practiced on the physical simulator completed the task in an average of 7.9 minutes with a deviation (±) of 3.3 minutes. Those who used the virtual stimulator did the task in 13.05 minutes (±2.6 minutes) vs an average of 15.5 minutes (±5.6 minutes) for the group that had no practice (p < 0.05).

Brain imaging measured activity in the primary motor cortex, located in the frontal lobe. The researchers found that the simulator groups had significantly higher cortical activity than the group that had no training.